How to
Innovate Your Innovation
You
can't just decide that your organization is going to create more breakthroughs.
There's a methodology to creating magic.
Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation
and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology
Looks
to me like the curtain on the innovation theater is about to come down. At
1871, the Chicago incubator I ran, we called the constant parade of
well-intentioned but largely clueless visitors and the accompanying startup
charade the "entrepreneurial petting zoo". The visitors' vain hopes
were that, in the course of viewing such a serious concentration of
entrepreneurs, and, by some process akin to osmosis, a little innovation juice
would rub off on them and maybe a radical idea or two would mystically emerge.
Good luck with that. You're a lot more likely to be hit by lightning which,
when you think about it, would certainly be more stimulating. There's got to be
a better and smarter way to create a culture of innovation and help your people
get headed in the right direction.
There's
no magic or madness to successful innovation, but there is a lot of method,
preparation and patience. The best people in the innovation business practice,
iterate and improve their programs all the time. Effective innovation is a
constant, company-wide, process, not a project or a department, which you must
(a) authentically commit to, (b) aggressively organize around, (c) systemically
implement, integrate, and enforce throughout your operations, and then
(d) measure against real metrics on a continuing
basis. It's not some piecemeal placebo or a quick fix panacea. And
innovation is also not about trying to move the needle tomorrow. Small, sure,
incremental steps and a celebration of early victories and results are the way
to go. Good things still take time.
Smart
innovation is based on an overall philosophy and a commitment to try to get a
little bit better across the board, every day, and all the time - not a
one-shot deal or a moonshot deal. Innovation is about what I call
"successive approximation" as opposed to "postponed
perfection, "which never happens anyway, is impossibly costly, and isn't
worth waiting for -- even if it ever showed up.
As a
general proposition, in radically-changing times like these, where the rate of
change continues to accelerate, waiting almost never gets you to a better
result. Elaborate planning, extensive documentation, and expensive research are
all forms of denial, postponement and mental pollution. In the meantime,
critical time passes and opportunities abate, necessary changes aren't made,
key people and partners depart for brighter pastures, and pressing problems
aren't addressed. Sadly, those problems won't lessen or disappear,
they'll propagate and worsen.
So, the
most important thing to do for any organization anxious to change for the
better is to get the process started. But too many companies are doing the same
old things and expecting different results and we all know that simply doesn't
happen. Try as you might, you can't harangue your folks into changing their
long-held habits especially those that worked pretty well in the past, but
which are doomed to fail tomorrow. Saying doesn't make it so. However huge your
hammer is, it's still impossible to nail Jell-O to a tree.
And if
you don't have an overall plan to successfully launch your new initiatives, to
assure that your people throughout the organization are invested in the
process, and to make certain that the changes you need to make will last,
everything else doesn't matter. That's regardless of how many
highbrow courses your people must sit through, whatever attractive financial
incentives you introduce, or how many inspirational notes and memos you send to
the troops.
You've
got to get things right at the beginning; speed doesn't matter unless you're
headed in the right direction. Off by an inch, miss by a mile. So, it's
critical to start straight and strong. The ultimate goal is to have the
innovations you implement stick. You need to be all about gaining
and growing traction and assuring long-term sustainability-
otherwise you're just treading water, upsetting your people for no good reason,
and wasting a lot of time and money. Finis origine pendet-- the
end depends upon the beginning.
There's
a simple problem with the traditional approach that most businesses are still
pursuing--and not merely that the traditional approach doesn't last over time or
produce real results. Much more insidious is the fact that it destroys your
company's culture. False starts, repeated half-assed attempts, and continued
failures send a message throughout your company that senior management doesn't
really care about innovation and change - even though your best and brightest
employees absolutely do. They all know that, if your business doesn't embrace
change, it will eventually die and, quite frankly, they're not likely to stick
around for the slow and painful funeral.
Great
companies and cultures are built when the employees sincerely believe that
their leaders are putting them first. You may have your own reservations and
even some doubts, but you've got to have faith in the people you're leading.
Your job is to get your people from where they are to where they've never been
and to show them a vision and a path to get there. You don't do that by sending
Sam and Mabel to San Francisco for a two-day strategy session. The sour dough
bread may be great, but the substance is increasingly suspect.
You
need a better and smarter plan than simply shipping a few of the folks to the
latest and greatest seminar to drink the new Kool-Aid and hope they come back
and inspire the team. They'll return only to find that they're trying to push a
rope and convince a bunch of non-believers to change in ways that they're not
even sure their management believes in. A couple of converts can't change a
company's culture by themselves. Save your breath and your money - it doesn't
work. I'm not certain that it ever did, but it's DOA today for sure.
The
good news is that I've seen a better solution. Tom Kuczmarski, the founder
of Kuczmarski
Innovation, has taught innovation and executive education for more than 30
years at topflight universities to more than 7,500 leaders from a wide variety
of industries. Over the last few years, he had consistently observed a
recurring structural problem and he's figured out a better way to go. Companies
weren't getting their innovation efforts off on the right foot because they
didn't understand the four basic requirements for long-term sustainable
success:
(1) Alignment-
Senior leaders need to visibly commit to and participate in/attend initial innovation
training sessions and final presentations because the depth and breadth of
company-wide engagement is critical; step one is for the senior management
participants to define and develop a clear strategy and some target
opportunities;
(2) Instruction-
Multiple junior team members attend training sessions where they learn to apply
the best new practices and tools for identifying specific opportunities and
implementing innovative solutions within their organizations for the precise
problem areas identified by senior management; step two trains the innovation
team and points them in the right direction as well as coaching them along the
way;
(3) Application-
Actual problem areas and potential solutions within the organization are
identified in progress discussions between the senior management attendees and
the innovation team members and specific innovation initiatives are authorized,
described and developed; step three advances the process and makes the proposed
solutions concrete and real rather than dealing in theoretical situations or
wishful thinking;
(4) Activation and Implementation-
Team members return to the organization with a plan, timetable, management
endorsement and support, and the tools they need to be successful in addressing
actual problems and issues and, more importantly, overcoming resistance,
inertia and internal obstacles; step four delivers the expected and sustainable
results.
Kuczmarski
Innovation has developed a new two-phase course ("Managing and Activating
Innovation") for training leaders throughout an organization to develop
readily achievable and sustainable innovation solutions for their businesses,
which incorporates all the foregoing objectives. It avoids many of the past
cultural, sponsorship and implementation problems and delivers both results and
a demonstrable ROI. It's a brief, practical, and hands-on program
that combines traditional faculty and experienced industry professionals. Full
disclosure: I've seen the materials and I'm hoping to be one of the lecturers in
the program myself this summer.
But, in
the final analysis, I think it works so well because it quickly connects and
engages a critical mass of interested parties across various levels of the
business and because it sends a most important and empowering message
throughout the culture: the best leaders don't create followers; they create
more leaders.
PUBLISHED
ON: FEB 26, 2019